Leda's Facet of Dioscuri

Pumpkins and Pin-cushions.

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                                                                                         paper

Things that You Won't Find in your Soup....

photograph from Marcos (the "Venerable")

This beautifully crafted work is by Marcus of Melbourne.

Taboo - as - Tattoo.

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Recently, it was proposed that an Australian tattoo register be made: this has led to varied reactions; mainly disbelief. Why would someone with a discreet tattoo wish to be linked to criminal social elements on a register that is obviously meant to be a tool to assist in the prevention of crime?

Looking at the changing face of tattoos, this version of adornment or beautification is creeping a little too close to a deliberate act of maiming and disfiguration. My recent exposure to non-mainstream tattoos on young females, sometimes by "famous" artists, has revealed a hideous side to the art. If the intention is not to beautify, according to an individual's personal taste, is the intention to disfigure?

Thirty years ago, a Point Road tattoo artist, in the red-light district of Durban, told me that the best tattooists had a code of ethics, which included not tattooing faces and hands. 

Yes, a tattoo register could be a useful social tool but not for the tattooed...I think that every owner of a tattoo tool, tattoo kit, or tattoo business, and any person performing tattoos, should be on a register with  a code of ethics and national regulations.

Tattoo crimes are happening today, but it is as taboo as the tattoo.

Faith in Our Maker : Dutiful Daughter.

Children have so much faith in their parents. In the order of heirachy, they are at the pinnacle of our lives. In our home, we just wore what we were given to wear (which included pale green knickers with a foam mushroom on the front, flared baby blue trousers and six inch platform sandals that matched my mother's); ate what was offered (mashed potatoes, boiled green beans, frozen carrots and Russian sausages) and did what we were told. 

"Doing what you are told" in my family was an inflexible option. One day, when I was sixteen, my dear mother carelessly said, "You have an appointment at the hair dressers for a perm tomorrow at two o'clock". We were living at a rural power-station village in Africa, so the hairdressing 'salon' was a walk away,  on the other side of the village. The next day, without any question and not a drop of hesitation, I walked to the salon and and presented myself for a 'perm'. A few hours later, I had been  transformed. The skinny, dark-haired kid from the convent had emerged looking like an astounding, two-legged tube with a pot scourer on it's head. For the next six months, I lived a very visible school life performing activities as a fund-raising ball waitress and reading in church for the nuns. 

Not realising that my 'perm' had reduced my invisibility, in preparation for church readings, I would sit through the boarder's two hour study session in the school hall with two pink foam curlers in my  hair, above my forehead. By the time I stood at the pulpit, I had two perfectly formed sausages above my brows, one on the left and one on the right, to supervise my biblical reading. So, every Wednesday, religiously, the nuns would ask me to do another reading…and  every Wednesday, about a hundred people, witnesses to the faith I had in my very own mother, concentrated carefully, as I stood before them, with my power-station 'perm'  and delivered the selected psalms to the cathedral.